I feel for my old co-workers at Oriflame for being slapped with this ad-bannage. First off, Oriflame is a bit like Avon in that there are troops of independent salespeople, and they are all armed with the all powerful catalogue. This catalogue is distributed to 38 different countries and 3.5 million consultants.
There's a silly amount of meetings discussing every detail of a layout where top execs from several different countries will offer their invaluable input such as "we need more glamour, can you print glitter?" and "She needs to smile more" followed by "No, smiles don't sell in my country" followed by "In my country she needs to smile like Mona Lisa" and so on.
Provided you haven't turned skitzo during one of these many meetings you will soon enough (read: six months) have a layout that has turned into a mishmash of details and additions much like that "if microsoft designed Apple packaging" video. Despite all that, you manage to produce something... And then the Swedish Reklamombudsman bans it because the girls looks like a ballerina-girl and the boy looks like a tool-loving boy.. It's enough to drive an art director to drinking the kid-bodywash advertised.

Newsweek is getting a lot of press for the cover "The first gay president", illustrated by Obama wearing a rainbow (neon?) halo above his head. He is getting this title for his "bullshit gay marriage announcement" as Gawker put it. As I recall in September last year Barack Obama was the first Jewish president, as depicted on the cover on New York Magazine, so I'm only here to point out the Badlander-like issue. If I see Barack Obama as the first woman president on a magazine cover near you soon, I'll personally slap the creative who designed that cover with a wet trout. I bet Obama will be wearing lipstick too.

Here's an update on those popchips ads we posted earlier this week. Gawker pondered if "racism sells?", since Asthon Kutcher put on a brownface when he played "Raj the Bollywood producer" in the popchips world wide lovers campaign. After Gawker wrote about it, so did Anil Dash and the ad has now been pulled off the intarwebs by the Popchips company. Quoting Gawker here who seem to have the same issue I have with these ads, they just plain ain't funny.

The ‘Strip for Likes’ campaign, live as of today, re-launches Amsterdam’s Facebook page for the American modis fashion brand- Stϋssy. The campaign has been created by Arnold Amsterdam, the new creative agency in town.
Sean Thompson, Head of Creativity, Arnold Amsterdam says: ‘As a contemporary brand you need to be wherever your fans live, shop or play. Facebook plays an integral part of their lives, Stϋssy AMS’ Facebook is therefore an important platform to engage with fans inform them or just share the fun.’
‘Like to see less, and share to undress’

I don't even.... I mean, Powerthirst was a viral skit, which later became a viral ad for a film, and now has been ripped as a real ad for mineral water? Seriously? Are our collective memories so short now that we don't remember 2007? Oh. It was the drugs. Sure. Blame the drugs.

The ASA calls the above campaign amateurish and we noted that the majority of clothing items featured in the ads were outer garments, and considered that the nature of the women’s poses meant that their breasts and buttocks were the focal points of the images rather than the products. We considered that the nudity was therefore gratuitous.

I'm sure we could do an entire badlander series of ads (and Chemical brothers music videos) filmed from trains. I'm showing you these three to demonstrate how different the mood can be despite how similar filmed the motion is.

Regarding the "Nike Free I would run to you" romantic saccarine overdose of an ad... Yes, It's been done before, and better too, because as I recall I didn't need an insulin shot after viewing the Japanese Cannes Gold Lion winning version of this running couple story. I did however need a bit of kleenex. Lets compare ads inside, shall we?

Via work that matters we find that WestJet flights now offer a kid-section, called Kargo Kids.

"As Canada's low-cost airline, we are constantly looking for innovative and fun ways to enhance the guest experience," continued Richard Bartrem. "The initial feedback on Kargo Kids has been quite positive and we're looking forward to the peace and quiet while we get families where they need to be"

Here it seems that once again internet research has paid off for a creative team. One of the oldest badlanders we have showed that Southwest airlines campaign used viral webfilms as their funny idea back in 2000, so researching on the web is pretty old-school. We saw the Lego = Minimalist Simpsons image at the design firm Tobias & Tobias blog in a post aptly named Pattern Recognition recently, and now we see it as an ad for lego from Jung von Matt.

No idea where the photograph comes from, nor when it was made, even Tineye.com doesn't know.